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Date: Wed, 4 Oct 1995 00:17:59 CDT
Reply-To: ww@wwpublish.com
Sender: Activists Mailing List <ACTIV-L@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu>
From: Workers World Service <ww@nyxfer.blythe.org>
Subject: HOW WASHINGTON BACKED INDONESIAN BLOODBATH
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Oct. 5, 1995 issue of Workers World newspaper
How Washington backed bloodbath in Indonesia
By Deirdre Griswold, in Workers World,
5 October, 1995
When the last decade's setbacks for the world
socialist movement are fairly evaluated, and the external, objective
factors are considered along with subjective problems of leadership--one
antecedent event will stand out as having had a profound effect on the
fate of tens of millions of exploited and oppressed workers and
peasants.
That event was the massacre of the Indonesian
progressive movement by the fascist military in 1965-66.
The 30th anniversary of the beginning of this
bloody process is now here. So far, little has been said about it in the
corporate media. In this year when it seems every serious TV program is
a documentary on some anniversary or other, the reticence to even
mention the Indonesian massacre is conspicuous.
Half the U.S. population is too young to recall
these events. Few of the older half ever heard about them. They were as
underreported then as now.
Yet in a few brief months, the cream of
Indonesia's labor, peasant, youth and women's movements was mowed down
in a vicious counter-revolutionary assault.
Estimates in the Western press ran
from
300,000 to
1 million killed.
It was the Asian equivalent of
Hitler's mass murders
in Europe.
And behind this bold offensive by the Indonesian
generals was the hand of the CIA, the Pentagon and U.S. imperialist
politicians.
COVER STORY FOR A COUP
The right-wing military rid the Indonesian
government of all its more nationalist and progressive figures and
placed President Sukarno under house arrest.
The cover story was that the Indonesian Communist
Party (PKI) had tried to stage a coup on Sept. 30, 1965--but that
patriotic officers foiled it and launched a counter-coup, rescuing the
country from a communist takeover.
It was an absurd tale. The PKI was the largest
Communist party outside of the socialist countries, with 3 million
members and links to 15 million more in mass organizations. Yet it was
totally unprepared for the struggle.
Its leaders were either assassinated or jailed
without ever calling out their supporters. There was no civil war. The
left was not armed.
The officer charged with plotting a coup, a Lt.
Col. Untung (many Indonesians have only one name) of Sukarno's palace
guard, was not a communist but a nationalist who worked closely with the
president.
He and Air Marshal Omar Dhani later testified that they had
attempted to break up a clandestine "Council of Generals"
that, with CIA assistance, was plotting to overthrow Sukarno.
They killed six of the generals on Sept. 30, but
the main leaders of the plot escaped.
The surviving generals then accused all the
members of Sukarno's cabinet of participating in an attempted communist
coup. The whole government was rounded up and some executed.
Clearly, the generals were the real coup makers.
They destroyed the civilian government. But they
also did much more.
They made the rivers in many parts of Indonesia
literally run red with the blood of their victims. For months, the army
went from village to village, island to island, shooting and hacking at
whoever was pointed out to them by local reactionaries as "trouble
makers."
The police, landlords and merchants used this
holocaust as the opportunity to settle old scores and tame the mighty
popular movement. Hundreds of thousands who survived the killings were
jailed for decades in barbaric concentration camps, where many died.
300 YEARS OF COLONIAL RULE
Indonesia had been in ferment since World War II.
Before that, for over 300 years the peoples of what Europeans called the
East Indies were colonial subjects of Holland and, at times, England.
With a population of 100 million on 3,000 islands
spread out along the Equator, the Indies had great potential in the
post-colonial era. The islands are mountainous and have important
minerals.
The soil on Java is rich and fertile, the growing
season year-long. There is oil on Sumatra, and rubber and valuable
timber in Kalimantan and West Irian.
The riches of the Indies had made little Holland a
world power. All the other colonialists must have thought at one time or
another that they'd like to push aside the Dutch and take over this
juicy plum.
In the late 1930s, Japanese troops marched into
the Asian colonies of not only Holland but Britain, France and the U.S.
The ensuing world war undermined the old class structures. It brought a
growing national consciousness to the millions of workers and peasants,
who were being squeezed by both colonial overlords and feudal masters.
By the end of the war, independence movements had
great popular support. Socialist ideas had taken root among many of the
workers.
It was President Dwight Eisenhower who drew the
attention of U.S. politicians to Indonesia. In his infamously frank
speech to a 1953 governors' conference, he said Washington should
continue to foot the bill for the French war in Indochina because
"if we lost all that, how would the free world hold the rich empire
of Indonesia?"
CIA SUBVERSION
By the late 1950s, Washington was trying to
subvert the independent Republic of Indonesia. This became public when a
CIA pilot, Allen Lawrence Pope, was shot down over Sumatra in 1958 while
flying with a right-wing rebel force.
But the nationalist government wasn't strong
enough to tell Washington to get lost. Between 1959 and 1965, the U.S.
pumped $64 million in military aid to the right-wing Indonesian
generals, cultivating those who would become its "friends."
Sukarno knew what was going on. He tried to break
loose with his defiant anti-imperialist statement, "To hell with
your aid!"
But he also continued to balance between the
military and the mass progressive movement, which was agitating for
seizure of the property of both foreign imperialists and local
aristocrats.
In Washington, some in Congress either didn't
catch on to what U.S. aid really meant or needed reassurance for their
corporate friends that this money was building a Trojan Horse inside
Indonesia. In the summer of 1965, the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee
on the Far East called Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy to
testify on a recent trip to Djakarta.
Why are we giving this aid to Sukarno? the
committee members wanted to know.
"I want to point out," replied Bundy
carefully, "that this equipment is being sold to the Indonesian
army and not the Indonesian government."
"What's the difference?" demanded Rep.
William Broomfield.
"When Sukarno leaves the scene, the military
will take over," replied Bundy. "We want to keep the door
open."
Bundy didn't have a crystal ball. But three months
later, the Indonesian military, equipped by the U.S., had taken over and
was carrying out its holocaust against the popular movement.
U.S. HAND IN MASSACRES
When the news about the bloodbath finally began to
appear in the U.S. press, it was in small drips and drabs. There were no
headlines, no expressions of horror or indignation, no editorializing
about human rights.
But many media insiders did know exactly what was
going on.
James Reston wrote in the June 19, 1966, New York
Times: "The savage transformation of Indonesia from a pro-Chinese
policy under Sukarno to a defiantly anti-communist policy under Gen.
Suharto is, of course, the most important of these [more hopeful
political developments in Asia].
Washington is being careful not to
claim any credit for this change in the sixth most populous and one of
the richest nations in the world, but this does not mean that Washington
had nothing to do with it.
"There was a great deal more contact between
the anti- communist forces in that country and at least one very high
official in Washington before and during the Indonesian massacre than is
generally realized. Gen. Suharto's forces, at times severely short of
food and munitions, have been getting aid from here through various
third countries, and it is doubtful if the coup would ever have been
attempted without the American show of strength in Vietnam or been
sustained without the clandestine aid it has received indirectly from
here."
The success of the coup undoubtedly emboldened
Washington to escalate the Vietnam War. It also was a major setback for
Peoples China, not just diplomatically--Sukarno had taken a strong
anti-imperialist stand in the non-aligned movement-- but politically,
because it deepened the split inside China and between China and the
USSR. It strengthened the "pragmatists" inside China who
wanted to abandon revolutionary politics in favor of accommodating to
U.S. imperialism.
The coup became a model for the fascists in Chile
and their CIA mentors. As pressure grew on the Allende government in the
early 1970s, fascist graffiti appeared on the walls of Santiago:
"Djakarta is coming."
PROTESTS IN U.S.
In the U.S., only Youth Against War & Fascism,
the youth group of Workers World Party, protested the Indonesian
bloodbath. It organized demonstrations and a major conference at
Columbia University calling for an international inquest into the
monumental crimes being committed and the role of the U.S. government.
The three decades since the coup have seen dynamic
capitalist development in Indonesia, but at the expense of the masses.
The military bureaucrats siphon off what cream is left them by the
imperialist transnational corporations-- which are carting away
Indonesia's mineral wealth, its forests, and its crops at an
unprecedented rate.
Indonesian workers now produce textiles and tennis
shoes for Western markets--and get paid pennies an hour.
The Indonesian military government invaded East
Timor in 1975--with the blessing of U.S. President Gerald Ford and
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger--and tried to crush the liberation
movement there. Twenty years and 200,000 deaths later, the struggle in
East Timor goes on.
Slowly, the Indonesian masses are rising to their
feet again. But the leaders of every strike, every student protest,
every women's meeting must look over their shoulders night and day,
fearing the brutal power of the military state.
National liberation and socialist emancipation of
the working class and peasantry had seemed to be on the order of the day
in the early 1960s. The coup set this dream back for a long time.
The Indonesian massacre had a profound effect on
the communist movement, especially in Asia. This must not be forgotten
in all the reruns analyzing the setbacks for socialism.
In a discussion of the difficulties facing the
oppressed masses, how can the utter intransigence of the rulers be left
out? How can social transformation be seriously considered without
taking into account that those with privilege and property may resort to
any means, including mass murder, to stay on top?
As part of the re-evaluation of communist strategy
and tactics, it's worth studying how the mass Indonesian party and the
even larger movement it represented could be defeated. This can help
illuminate the revolutionary strategies that ended in success elsewhere.
(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission
to reprint granted if source is cited. For more information contact
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@wwpublish.com.
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